


The Second Kingdom

by RurouniHime



Series: Purgatory [1]
Category: The Maze Runner (Movies)
Genre: Angst, Animal Death, Blood and Injury, Crank Newt, Fix-It, Graphic Depictions of Illness, Graphic Description, Guilt, Hallucinations, Injury Recovery, M/M, Major Character Injury, Survival, The Death Cure Spoilers, The Flare, The Maze Runner Spoilers, The Scorch, Thomas may be going crazy, Zombies, but Newt's already there
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-25
Updated: 2018-04-28
Packaged: 2019-04-27 22:45:24
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 9,150
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14435757
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RurouniHime/pseuds/RurouniHime
Summary: They’re outside in the waste again, he and once-Newt, where the desert is devouring the fringe buildings, and this is worse.But he swore, somewhere back in the doped up haze: he’s not done. When it’s time, he’s still going to bury Newt.(Thomas's POV)





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Everyone's gotta do a fix-it fic, so here's mine, or one of them. Takes place right after the flight from the falling WCKD tower and is arguably, dare I say it... canon compliant? *gasp* I guess it depends on how you read some of these scenes. You'll know what I mean.
> 
>  **WARNINGS:** When I say graphic description? Oh yeah. If bodily stuff makes you squeamish, please take care of you first and give this one a pass. I love the zombie genre. I love writing it, I love reading it, I love watching it, I love all of it, and this is technically a zombie story (and all that comes with it) for a while.
> 
> Fic title from Dante's _Purgatorio_.

**I**

 

_Day one_

In the beginning, there had been a purpose. Now he doesn’t know what he meant to do. Bury Newt, he thinks. Newt deserved to be buried, in a proper grave like the Gladers had dug in the Deadheads. Thomas remembers—the only thing he recalls absolutely clearly, a marginal thought right as Janson’s bullet burrowed through his belly: he remembers knowing that Newt would be left to rot in the middle of that plaza, until the fires came, or the crows. Or other Cranks. Starving and stupid people.

Now he is one of those people, and Newt is no longer in that plaza. 

Now they’re both outside the walls, and his Newt is nowhere.

The sun beats down with a punishing fist, and sand snaps across every inch of bare skin. Thomas gives up on the scrap of cloth he’s been trying to keep over his mouth and slumps to the ground, a hand flattened against his side. Each breath digs a poker between his ribs. When he can get his knees under him again, he shuffles over and tightens the final knot. 

The thing that was Newt howls its throat raw, snarls and snaps at Thomas’s hands. Newt’s lips are black with bile. His skin is a maze of festering flesh, whipped as red and raw by the sand as Thomas’s, and the blood covering the front of his shirt is still damp around his ribs. He wrenches at the strips of fabric that Thomas has used to lash him to the metal beam, and his eyes... Well. They’re still brown in there. Somewhere.

It’s hot. The ash from the Last City coats Thomas’s tongue. Wind screams through the ruins, putrid with charred bodies. They’re outside in the waste again, he and once-Newt, where the desert is devouring the fringe buildings, and this is worse.

But he swore, somewhere back in the doped up haze: he’s not done. When it’s time, he’s still going to bury Newt.

**

He remembers the Berg, the exploding city. Snapshots in pieces, like singed bits of paper twirling out of reach. Icy fountain water burrowing through his clothes. Minho’s sallow face and bruised eyes under clinical blue. Newt’s throat, blackening inch by snarled inch. He remembers Janson’s contemptuous smirk, and being shot.

He remembers Teresa, falling into fire.

The knife made that thick, sucking sound between his and Newt’s bodies. For a moment, he thought he was the one who’d been stabbed. And then he knew the truth, and he couldn’t see Newt’s face anymore, even though he was so close, even though he blinked and blinked. His eyes kept watering, ash and smoke and the obvious. He still hears Newt’s last word.

He remembers knowing he didn’t deserve gratitude there in that hellish street, or ever. The guilt sank into his gut; nothing like the comet trail of the bullet to come, but by the time Janson shot him, nothing mattered, not anymore.

He remembers shutting his eyes—shutting out Brenda’s desperate face as the Berg chopped higher into the heavens—and hoping he would finally just die.

 

_Zero Hour_

_Tommy...?_

He heard it as he faded in and out, as the Berg’s rotors whumped, as Brenda cradled his face, as Vince shouted for Gally to _find something, damn it, search the bag!_ Minho shook him again and again, until finally the shaking sank after Thomas into the black hole he had tipped himself backward into.

His stomach was on fire. His eyes stung from smoke and his throat felt split down the middle. Teresa was dead, and Newt, Newt was... Something stabbed into his chest; cold filled his torso and cascaded into his limbs. Suddenly he was mercilessly awake. They were all shouting now, their mouths forming his name, but he couldn’t hear what they were saying. His heart hammered through his ears, obliterating their voices. But he heard Newt.

_Tommy...?_

The last word Newt ever said.

A jolt, so hard the pain erupted afresh and burned through the cold of whatever they’d injected into him. The Berg tilted, a metal scream slicing the sky. The floor shuddered. Thomas rolled, and a body dropped atop him.

Spinning.

“—have to land!”

“No, we’re not clear—”

“Just until—”

Another metal scream, and a _boooooooooooom_ that rattled all the way through Thomas’s flimsy guts, up, out of his throat. He cried out.

“Thomas? Thomas!”

_Tommy...?_

Hot wind whipped over him. An alarm was blaring, like WCKD had blared when they infiltrated the lab, when Newt... when Newt.

“—right, alright! Take her down.”

More tilting. Crying. A thunk, a bounce, another thunk, and a grinding slide.

Silence.

“Get out there, fix that prop!” Jorge?

“Yes,” Thomas whispered. “Jorge.” Footsteps clattered against metal. Someone’s hair brushed his face.

“What did you say? Thomas?”

The bay door opened, clanking and groaning, and the war outside flooded back in. The heat was horrendous. Thomas curled away from it. Hands grabbed him, pulled him out of the way across the floor of the Berg, and someone ran past, out into the street. Then another person. Another. Thomas’s eyes swam.

“Stay here.” The voice belonging to the hair in his face, the comforting weight atop him. Smelled familiar, sweat and wool and gunpowder.

“Brenda,” he said, but she was gone. Thomas blinked until his eyes cleared. Kids he didn’t know huddled against the sides of the Berg, bathed in blue from inside and the orange of flames from without. The rat-a-tat-tat of gunfire was far off, though the explosions were not. A ball of light burst in the sky, flooding the street beyond the ramp in stark relief. Thomas pressed a hand against the heavy ball of numbness in his stomach, and inched toward the ramp to see.

They hadn’t flown far. The wreck of WCKD’s tower still plunged earthward, great chunks breaking free and hurtling down. One struck a walkway overhang, shrapnel bursting like burning flowers on the cement beams. The ruin of a truck smoldered, on its side in the middle of the street. Its gun lay in pieces on the asphalt, and bodies made soft furrows in the road. The fighting had moved on, though the buildings still groaned their death throes.

From where he lay, Thomas could still see the plaza.

_Could I have saved him?_

_You can save us all._

He looked down at his belly: at his torn shirt, at his pallid skin, at the wad of gauze taped messily to his middle. The Berg shuddered again. Empty vials rolled across the floor and struck his thigh.

 _Adrenaline,_ read one.

There was something in his hand, nestled in the clammy heat of his palm. He uncurled his fingers, and there it lay, fragile glass and cobalt blue. The vial was smudged in blood.

His blood, inside and out. “I did this.” Teresa was not saved. Newt was not saved. “I did this.” 

He looked around and finally saw faces, wide eyes, open mouths. Tear-streaked cheeks. They were so much _younger_ than he remembered. Kids, waiting to be strung up. Survivors, clawing for a last lick of freedom and, on board this Berg, everyone left in this world that he’d ever cared about.

They kept coming back for him, following him. Dying for him. 

He didn’t deserve the haven. He didn’t deserve to be saved.

Inevitably, he’d kill everybody here.

He stretched out until he found a grimy hand and pushed the cobalt blue vial into it. The kid’s mouth worked around words, but Thomas’s ears rang and rang. Nothing hurt; whatever they’d given him, his body was a buzzing void. He rolled away, worked himself up the wall by his elbows, then staggered down the ramp and pitched into the street, past his friends where they struggled to hammer a loose panel back onto a propeller. 

“I can do _this,”_ he muttered. His tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth. He hadn’t done it when he should have, when his best friend had begged him to, but now... Now he would.

_Tommy...?_

The Last City shook, its innards blowing apart, and Thomas followed the voice.

 

_Day three…?_

“I went to get your body.”

He has no idea how they got out of the city, but here they are, beyond the shattered walls. He’s missing those hours. Days? Day three, he decides. This will be day three.

Newt rages at him, writhing in his sad restraints. Those rags will never hold, not with the way he’s pulling at them, but Thomas can’t move anymore. His legs are dead weights, the agony returned to his stomach and radiating into every muscle. There’s a hole straight through him, he can’t see it, but he can feel the gaping maw. He’s tired and he can’t breathe this seared air. Newt yanks and yanks, screaming through a ravaged throat. Black drips out of his mouth and falls in blots to the dirt. Thomas has seen blots like that, a tarry pool in the middle of the plaza where Newt had dropped, and then spatters and streaks headed away from the inferno.

“But you weren’t there.” Empty plaza. No body. _Crank took him._ Thomas remembers that thought, too, and the white fury as though the Flare had at last blasted free all over his insides. Hadn’t Newt been through enough? Couldn’t he just be left alone?

But a Crank hadn’t actually taken Newt. And then Thomas laughs because, _actually,_ one had.

He’d found Newt two blocks over, wedged into a pile of rubble under a fallen overpass, I-beams and struts blown out of the nearest building with such force that they lodged into the concrete like quills, and there in the darkness was Newt, heaving, draining bile, his shirt and jacket a sodden mess.

The knife was gone.

Now, in the unforgiving Scorch, Thomas holds the knife up before him, squinting at its keen edges. Isn’t gone anymore, though he can’t recall finding it. Wasn’t in Newt at any rate. He sputters another laugh.

He’s going to die here, bleed to death or dehydrate. 

Or Newt’s going to get free.

 

_Day four_

He sleeps, if it can be called sleep. 

He’s pinned under a Griever and his arms won’t move. His legs are gone. His belly is a deep, dark chasm and everything, _everything_ hurts.

He dreams of Chuck. So this is what it’s like to die of a gunshot.

Thomas hears sand and wind, the world chipping away around him. He waits for the end.

 

_Day… six_

He wakes. He didn’t expect that. 

It’s twilight on the Scorch. He lifts his head out of the sand. It has half covered him, piled up in the concrete cul-de-sac, blown over his arms and buried his legs from the knees down. The fire in his innards has burned itself out, leaving him hollow and sore. 

Sitting up is torture, but he manages.

Newt is still alive.

“How?” It rasps from Thomas’s throat. Newt doesn’t answer. His head hangs, bobbing with each labored breath. His wrists are inflamed, bleeding into the rag. Which is barely hanging onto the beam. Thomas groans, forcing himself to his knees, but Newt hears it. It takes Thomas three approaches, finally around the back where a plate of corrugated metal blocks him from Newt’s worst thrashing. Thomas leans his body weight against the plate, pushing Newt flat to the sand, and reties the knots.

Newt’s shirt is dry now, stained so dark that the original color is lost. The jacket he wore is long gone. A second later, Thomas recognizes the binding around Newt’s wrists: red strips. He can’t recall dismembering the jacket. Tying Newt up. Newt’s shirt flutters, torn just over his ribs. Thomas squints against the sand.

There’s a bandage there.

Thomas checks his own wound. Bandage there, too: not the gauze from before, but a wide strip of fabric, seeping and dirty, the same as Newt’s. Makes no sense. Newt would not bind himself. Newt would never let Thomas get close.

He backs out of range and peels his bandage off, wincing as it pulls free of the bullet wound, then rewraps it at the cleanest section he can find and sits there as sweat runs down his face. Thinks.

“Adrenaline.” He was awake in the Berg. Mercilessly. That’s what they gave him. Had he almost died, then? The flight feels like a dream.

How in God’s name did he ever get a bandage around Newt’s stab wound? 

He gets his answer when the sun drops below the horizon for good and Newt goes completely silent, sagging against the restraints. 

“Hey. _Hey.”_ Nothing rouses him, not even a kick to his foot. So Thomas examines his torso where the shirt hangs open, counts the breaths puffing Newt’s diseased lungs like a bellows. He thinks about rewrapping this bandage too, but his fear is only dulled, not gone. Judging by the stains, the knife wound is high and to the right, leaning toward Newt’s armpit. The blade could have glanced off a rib. Thomas knows enough about shock to know what it does to the body. And Newt was already riding shock like a tidal wave.

He shakes—with grief, with hysteria—until his stomach is all afire again, and he finally passes out. 

The knife had deflected against Newt’s ribs. He’d left Newt alive in that shucking street.

 

_Day seven_

He tries to find water. 

When he gets back, crows hop around Newt, leaping away when he lashes out, pecking at the congealing Flare blood on his boots. Thomas shouts at them, bats them off with a length of pipe he can’t lift for more than ten seconds. More crows fly in, alighting yards away, cawing excitedly every time Thomas lowers the pipe. 

There’s enough left of Newt’s coat to make a lead. Thomas loops a length around Newt’s shoulders and neck like Minho did to Ben at the Banishment. Newt lunges and growls at him, and Thomas is out of breath by the time he’s done, sweating with fever. But the crows bob and chitter, ducking closer and closer in little hop-steps.

He unties Newt from the beam and drags him out of the city’s edge, into the desert.

 

_Day eight_

On the eighth day, a Berg streaks overhead, then spirals to the ground with a _crunch_ and a plume of sand. Terror clogs Thomas’s swollen throat. He limps as fast as he can, holding his side with one hand and Newt’s lead with the other. 

They came back for him just like they always do, and now they’re dead too.

It’s illogical. As far as they know, there’s nothing to come back to. Sure enough, as he nears the wreckage, he sees clear markings for WCKD on the upturned underbelly. Smoke pours from the cockpit. This craft is still bright silver and has an extra engine on either side.

Inside, bags and crates have upturned, smashing fluid onto the ceiling. A full canteen swings from the pilot’s charred arm, its durable metal untouched by the crash. A kit marked with a cross is magnetized to the wall. Thomas turns over box after box and finds WCKD stamped across all of them. The ones that didn’t break completely reveal row upon row of medication swathed in padding.

Thomas grabs one of the sacks tacked to the wall and stuffs everything that will fit into it. He slaps embers off a roll of canvas and takes that as well. He unties Newt’s lead from the listing propeller at the rear, then ties him up again and roots around in the Berg’s underbelly until he unearths a film strip full of syringes. 

They can’t stay. Others will have seen the crash, and the smoke is getting too thick to breathe.

 

_Day… ?_

He dreams of syringes, wakes and finds them in his hands, bottles of gem-like liquid toppled beside him. Some he recognizes from the Med-jacks’ stash, from Mary, from the Right Arm—

Penicillin. Vancomycin. Tetracycline. Doxycycline—

Most he doesn’t. None of them are blue.

He wakes far too near Newt sometimes, used syringes in hand, and can’t think clearly enough to get himself away again.

 

_Day…?_

What the fuck is he doing?

What the fuck is he doing out here?

 

_Day…?_

There’s no way to tell how much time has passed, but in the distance, the Berg wreck has stopped smoking.

Newt has twisted his wrists raw. His eyes are hollow and hungry, dark with Flare bile and old blood.

Thomas’s abdomen has been eaten by fever. It’s all he can feel. All he knows.

He dies. He must. What other option is there?

 

_Day…?_

There is, as it turns out, another option.

 

_Day…?_

The bag hisses at his feet. A voice scratches out.

He stares. Even Newt swivels his head to look. The bag hisses again, static and a series of clicks. Thomas roots inside with a quaking hand until he finds hard plastic and drags out a two-way radio.

He can’t make out words. Just talking, low like a recording. He twists the dial, drugged, curious, and releases a blurt of static.

 

_Day… one_

He has no idea what day it is. So he starts over.

~tbc~


	2. Chapter 2

**II**

 

_Day two_

He cries while killing a lizard.

One moment, he’s bringing the rock down, and the next, he’s in pieces, sobbing from the center of his chest, cursing and beating until the twitching stops.

He falls on his side, the bad side. Everything goes fiery white. Then it’s dim and flat again, a splotch of fresh blood on the rocks, and he can’t stop weeping, inhaling sand. He thinks of Winston, who killed animals for everyone.

He brings the lizard back, works its innards free, and shoves it on a stick. There’s a brand new lighter in the first aid kit; fire is an easy thing. By the time the lizard cooks, he’s so hungry he burns his tongue wolfing the first half of it down.

Thomas wipes his face with his shirt and sets the uneaten half of the lizard on the ground, then kicks it toward Newt. Newt ignores it: he’s done nothing but shriek at Thomas all day, teeth gnashing and froth collecting at the corners of his mouth. Now the screams have whittled down to rasps. They no longer sound like they did that night in the plaza. Newt still pulls at his bonds, but weakly. Dehydration shows around his eyes and in the sores on his lips.

Thomas unties one of Newt’s hands, unsure of what will happen. But Newt pays little attention to his still-bound wrist. He just snatches out with the other hand, scrabbling for Thomas over and over.

He doesn’t touch the lizard. Finally Thomas takes it back and eats the rest himself.

 

_Day four_

In the mornings, he clicks through channels on the radio while the sun heats the earth. If he faces east, someone beeps and beeps, Morse code. To the north where the city still burns, the recording drones, too muddled to make out. All else is static.

One morning, he faces the city, and the radio says his name. _“Thomas?”_

His lungs empty. He grips the radio, trembling. It hisses, catches. Says his name again.

_“Thomas?”_

_Tommy…?_

The voices overlap. Sweat and wool and gunpowder. 

_“Thomas, are you there?”_

His throat is frozen. Thomas squeezes the casing until it creaks, and thinks of Gally.

“I belong to the Scorch,” he whispers. But there’s no one around who cares. 

 

_Day five_

Newt is going to starve to death.

Thomas screams at him, hurls rocks to either side of him and curses WCKD straight into hell’s bowels. He pounds his fist against the ground until his knuckles bleed.

He came back to bury Newt. He didn’t sign up for _this._

“Newt,” he whimpers into the darkness, at night when his soul is at its thinnest. “Newt. Please.”

But Cranks don’t care about food. He’s seen it before, watched it shamble by him in the bleached shantytowns of the Scorch: they know, for a time. They eat while they still think about eating. Eventually they don’t even understand that. And it’s not really Newt he’s talking to anymore.

Newt’s wrists have grown so thin that Thomas could circle each with thumb and pinky, if Newt would let him. They walk, at twilight when the heat finally leaches away into the atmosphere. There are other Cranks. Some are so far gone, their skin has worn away from their scalps. But they don’t bother Newt, and they don’t bother Thomas.

Thomas becomes used to killing lizards. Thomas doesn’t think about watching Newt die. 

Thomas tries not to think.

One morning he throws the tail of a lizard to the side, burnt to charcoal through inattention, and—

Newt picks it up. His fingers dig into carbonized flesh, kneading and prodding. Eventually those fingers push the flesh into his mouth. Newt chews like he’s forgotten what teeth are for. Black skin flakes all over his chin like filthy snow.

Thomas drops the rest of the lizard into the fire in surprise.

Some days Newt eats like a rabid, all wheezes and grunts and a queer light behind his eyes that Thomas doesn’t like to look at.

But he eats.

 

_Day seven_

Thomas gets his first good look at his wound in the waning glow of twilight. It’s closing, badly. He’ll scar, the skin already rucked up and ugly, as though his body has tried to bury it. But there’s no heat. No jaundice.

He checks Newt, one eye on that rocking head, on those empty eyes. The knife wound is thin and ragged-edged, grimy veins slithering away from it like a tangle of roads. The skin is closed, Thomas thinks. He presses around the edges, but Newt’s skin burns wildly with Flare fever and infection is impossible to determine.

Thomas rewraps the wound in a fresh bandage.

 

_Day eight_

“Catatonic.”

Newt sways, his gaze sliding back and forth over the ground.

Thomas crouches on his toes, ready to jump back. He waves his fingers in front of Newt’s eyes. Dark fluid dribbles from Newt’s mouth, a thin stream that Thomas— _“Shuck_ it” —darts in and wipes away.

Newt sways.

Thomas cleans his face, the end of Newt’s own shirt dipped into the lid of the canteen, taking care at the sunburned skin bridging Newt’s nose. He pictures Lawrence’s mangled features, then pushes the image away. He cleans the injection holes on Newt’s arms. He doesn’t remember giving him the shots, but they’re fresher than everything else. He must have, in his fever. One for him, one for Newt. One for him, one for Newt.

“What do you see?” he murmurs.

Newt doesn’t answer. Newt doesn’t bite. 

Newt sways.

Thomas lifts the canteen and dribbles water down the side of Newt’s face into his mouth.

 

_Day ten_

Usually it’s Brenda. Sometimes it’s worse.

_“Don’t do this to me, Thomas, you jacked slinthead, answer me! I can’t lose both of you!”_

Thomas shuts his eyes and sees maps, smells Griever grease, hears footfalls in tandem and the synced huff of breath. He buries his face in his hands. 

All he does is leave people.

 

_Day eleven_

_“Thomas? Are you there?”_

_Day thirteen_

He wakes to find Newt’s bonds loose on the ground, stained with filth and sweat. He blinks, once. Twice.

So Newt is gone.

How does he feel about it? He doesn’t. His chest is the same empty hole it’s been for days. Thomas prods at it with aching fingertips. 

A scrape at his feet sends him rolling, his heart jumping up into his throat, both hands raised in front of him. Newt stands two yards away, not quite facing him. His eyes are trained on the ground; his head swings back and forth, a predator sweeping for movement. 

Thomas’s breath rockets from him, loud, impossible to miss. He scrambles back until he hits hot metal, and there the terror gets the better of him: he pulls his knees up, gets his legs as close to his chest as he can, and hangs on. His heart rams in his ears, his ribcage, his head. 

Newt looks his way. His eyes are glossy and black, the rims red. His mouth is slightly open, and stained teeth show between his lips. He stares at Thomas, eerily still.

 _Get up,_ Thomas’s mind tries. _Fight!_

He can’t move. _Newt. Newt, Newt, Newt._

Newt turns away, an odd wheeling motion that starts with his upper half and follows down to his feet. He shuffles farther into the shade, sneering up at the sun with his lips peeled back.

Sand batters Thomas’s legs. He tries to say Newt’s name. Nothing comes out.

**

Newt doesn’t leave.

They walk, Thomas lugging their dwindling bag of supplies over his shoulder, out from their makeshift shelter toward the next tumbled structure, which looks small and doll-like when they start. Thomas keeps his distance, listening to the sand shift and slide beneath Newt’s dirty shoes. The structure resolves slowly into a tangle of wooden planks and dead tree trunks, caught against the remains of a barbed wire fence. Thomas finally says his name out loud, that evening as the horizon swallows the sun. “Newt?”

Newt snarls at him, and Thomas shuts his mouth. He digs out a space in one of the rotted trunks and backs into it, Newt’s knife in one hand. Newt drops to the bare ground outside and lies there, limbs splayed, facing the sky. Thomas doesn’t sleep all night, but Newt doesn’t move.

The next morning, Newt still doesn’t leave.

 

_Zero Hour_

He dreams of a place as green as the Glade, but lush and warm, where everyone is safe and corn nods in rows, and the ocean thumps a heartbeat against fine white sand. It’s twilight—he sits on a log, pieces of paper rasping in his hands—then morning—he carves Teresa’s name into a rock with Gally’s pick and hammer. He looks down and to the right, sees Newt’s name beside it, and screams himself awake.

Grit rasps over his wrists and the night’s chill sears his nostrils. The Scorch is a blank and barren waste littered with shadow.

In his cranny, Newt sleeps on, his limbs twitching.

 

_Day twenty_

The Flare always takes fingers. Toes, nose, ears. Eventually it chews its way up legs and into arms. Newt’s lips have cracked and split, white with lack of blood. The ends of his fingers are blue. Hypoxic. Thomas injects the last of the vitamins into them both, then huddles through the darkest hours of the night, counting the bottles of medications he knows, dreading the day a new infection begins to spread.

It’ll happen. Newt’s extremities will die. If he’s lucky, they’ll just drop off. If he’s not, gangrene will bloat up inside him and melt everything away.

One day, a storm dumps a flood over the earth, churning mud into rivers that pulverize the soil and scrape it down to bedrock. Within an hour of direct sunlight, most of it has baked away again, but in places where debris has piled up, pools collect. Thomas drops next to one and cleans his face and hands, careful not to swallow any of it. 

Right as the sun sets, he shoves Newt into the deepest pool.

The effect is like a bomb going off. Newt shrieks and thrashes, howls rising into the sky. His limbs spasm like giant springs; he writhes his way out of the water and comes straight for Thomas. 

Thomas trips, falls on his back. Something slices into his right arm, but Newt knocks him flat and screams obscenities into his face. Water patters from his hair onto Thomas’s cheeks. He blinks—he’s in the plaza. Blinks—in the Scorch. He gets his arms up between them. Newt strikes and beats and scratches, then tips sideways and rolls away.

Thomas lies gasping in the sand, tears squeezing from his eyes as Newt fugues. 

When he’s certain Newt is down, Thomas crawls over, cradling his arm. It’s cut, a gash clear through his jacket down by the wrist. The ground is littered with rusted metal, wet from Newt’s dousing. Thomas ties the cut up, then uses his coat sleeve to carefully clean around Newt’s mouth, nose, and ears again. The skin at each is fragile, peeling back like brittle paper. He saturates his sleeve in the pool and massages Newt’s fingers one by one. Takes his boots off and works on his toes.

Teresa’s mother removed her own eyes. For some reason, amidst the necrotizing veins, the seeping skin and the steadily stiffening limbs, that is the image that stays with Thomas. That one day, Newt might take out his own eyes.

He can’t allow that. He can’t.

He starts to laugh, until his eyes well again. Newt is going to die and Thomas is worried about saving his eyes.

Why, _why_ hadn’t he kept Teresa’s last serum?

Will Newt end up like the things in the sewers, covered in roots and half grown into the walls? Will he chew his tongue off? Will there come a day when Thomas looks him in the face and doesn’t recognize a single thing he sees?

This is hell. He wipes his face but the tears keep coming, his lungs jerking against his ribs until he can barely breathe at all. This is _hell._

_Day twenty-one_

And Thomas deserves it.

 

_Day twenty-three_

_“Please, Thomas. If you’re there,_ please _answer me.”_

Thomas turns off the radio.

 

_Day twenty-four_

“Please, Tommy.”

He thinks he imagined it. His ears have been playing tricks on him for days, or maybe he’s still stuck under that broken Berg wing, mostly dead in the sand.

“Please.”

He opens his eyes.

The world is still orange, still burned. He’s hot enough to sweat, but the wind whisks it away immediately.

“Please, Tommy.”

His body responds without thought, wired into that voice. “Newt?”

“Please.” A heavy, rattling rasp. “Tommy.”

Newt slumps against a dune, a slow sway of his torso. Back and forth, back and forth. It’s twilight. “Kill me.” His voice croaks, as flat as the Scorch plains. He stares at nothing. “Before I kill you.”

“What?” He tells his heart no, no. But it’s too late. Dormant emotions quicken in his chest, things he hasn’t felt since that knife went into Newt’s body. _Newt, oh god, Newt._

“Kill me,” Newt repeats. “Before I kill you.”

And then Thomas understands what's happening. 

He hits the sand on his knees and vomits. Nothing but bile. But his stomach heaves and heaves.

He’s sure: he’ll keep heaving forever.

He doesn’t.

“Please, Tommy.”

 _Please, Tommy, please._ It’s the same. It’s nothing like the same.

 

_Day twenty-seven_

He should have chewed his tongue off by now.

“Kill me. Tommy.”

Thomas is going to go insane. 

He shuts it out. Flattens his hands over his ears and ignores Newt.

 

_Day twenty-nine_

He waits till Newt is asleep—if it can be called sleep—then digs the branch completely free of the earth and gets to his feet.

The sky is cold and clear, a million stars spraying across the black. Newt’s face is porcelain, threaded with fine, dark lines. His mouth moves: words he once spoke, now speaking again, involuntary. A dirge. 

The branch is thin and worn down at one end, heavy and jagged at the other. Sharp. Thomas gets a good grip and raises it over his head, his breath puffing in clouds. 

Newt’s eyes are dark. Full. The contrast of shadow and starlight feeds a phantom life into his irises. Thomas can’t tell the Flare from the rest. The incessant movement of Newt’s lips pauses; he draws an audible, shuddering breath.

Newt’s already gone. There’s nothing here of the friend Thomas knew, just crumbling flag posts poking up out of a mutilated brain. What’s left of it is just sparking, synapses going off when brushed by a dying ember. These aren’t Newt’s words anymore. It’s cruel—the cruellest thing Thomas has ever done, beyond the maze, beyond WCKD—keeping him alive like this.

“Do it,” he hisses through his teeth. He squeezes the end of the branch in both hands. “Damn it, _do_ it.”

Newt’s eyes, half lidded, stare up into the sky. His shoulders hitch like a rickety heartbeat. 

Thomas drops the branch, throws himself down against the farthest boulder he can find, and quietly panics.

He can’t do it. He couldn’t even kill lizards without weeping.

 

_Day… thirty-one_

Newt just kind of... walks.

It’s purposeless. There’s awareness there, but nothing like what Thomas remembers. He doesn’t seem to see Thomas, never really acknowledges he’s there. When he stops, Thomas stops too, sure that if he falls asleep, he’ll wake up and Newt will have moved on without him. Thomas starts finding alcoves to sleep in, buildings and wreckages battered into u-shapes; places to contain Newt during the night, or at least make noise to alert Thomas if he leaves. But when night drops, Newt flops down on the ground like a dead thing and doesn’t get up. He looks like a corpse, a body that is somehow following Thomas around.

Thomas knows the truth: he’s the one following.

He wishes he could catch up, and not just physically. Truly catching Newt means being dead like Newt.

Newt hates the sun, like the rest of the Cranks. But they don’t come out much during the day. At some point, Newt starts walking vaguely west. At least, Thomas assumes it’s west. Every night, the sinking light leaves his vision blistered and orange. Newt heads into the sunset, as though he knows that the morning will chase him, hotter and fiercer than anything the evening can offer. 

“Did they ever watch you guys?”

Of course there’s no answer he can use. Thomas draws patterns with a stick in the dirt, overturning cracked earth. His vision has been swimming lately, his balance off. “Did they… I don’t know. Record, without experimenting. Just let you play out?” 

_Of course they did, you idiot. It was WCKD. If you can think of it, WCKD tried six different variations._

Newt heads west. 

His feet drag furrows in the sand when it’s sand and scrape over rock when it’s rock. Thomas cuts off his own hair with Newt’s knife when it grows down into his eyes. He cuts Newt’s whenever Newt will let him. Newt’s hair continues to grow, dark at the roots until the sun gets its grip. 

Did WCKD ever know that Cranks’ hair still grew?

 

_Day thirty-four_

“Follow you anywhere,” once-Newt mumbles.

“And I didn’t ask you to!” Thomas screams in his face. He storms away, but his legs shake; he has to stop before he falls. “Didn’t ask you to.” 

The second time comes out broken.

Newt wanders in an aimless circle, shuffling sand. His ankle turns against a rock. Thomas looks him up and down.

“You’re the logical one. What am I supposed to do?” Newt always did what needed to be done. And yet somehow, he was docile in it. The caretaker. The bringer of mercy. “None of them would have followed me if not for you.”

It’s not strictly true. Minho would have followed. But without Newt, Thomas himself had been aimless, a threadbare scrap blown about by a ferocious gale. Newt kept him on the straight and narrow. 

_Newt_ kept him honest. This… is not Newt.

“Take it.” Once-Newt’s eyes flick back and forth, a frenzied jitter. His hand creeps up, right to the dip of his collar. He scratches the skin with his nails and plucks at his throat. “Take it.”

Thomas has no idea what that means. And then he does. He pulls open his coat collar, shivering despite the heat, and hauls the necklace out into the open. It trembles in his grip: black cord knotted back together where Newt tore it off, stiff with Newt’s dried blood. The charm is a cylinder, tarnished silver with a black ring. He doesn’t remember Newt picking it up, just that one day, Newt had it. One day, he was shoving it into Thomas’s hands as though the weight of the world dangled from its broken cord.

“I don’t know what you _want.”_ He shakes the thing. Yells at it instead of at Newt. His throat is full of lumps he can’t swallow. The sun bakes his shoulders and dampens his palms, and still he shivers. He bunches the cord in his fist and wheels back his arm, facing out into the waste.

But he’s not brave enough to throw Newt’s last gift away, just as he wasn’t brave enough to end his friend’s suffering.

He ties it back around his neck.

 

_Day thirty-five_

_You did this, Tommy._

He sits up, gasping into the dark. “Newt?” For a second, he could have sworn…

But no. The Newt here could never speak such truth. The Newt here could never care enough.

 

_Day thirty…seven_

_This is your fault._

He starts calling the voice Real Newt. Real Newt takes advantage of Thomas’s exhaustion, creeps up behind when once-Newt is fuguing, whispers hateful realities into his ear. Real Newt seems to come from everywhere, all at once.

“It’s not.” Thomas shakes his head. “I tried to stop it.”

_Yeah. Once you realized._

“Shut up.” Thomas buries his face in his hands. “Shut up, shut up, shut up.”

It’s not a real voice. Just an echo. But it’s Newt’s voice. The real Newt. Not this shell wearing Newt’s face, slurring Newt’s former words. Thomas laughs into the inferno radiating off the earth. He’s hallucinating, finally. It chokes him to the point where he can’t breathe. It’s hysterical.

_Thomas._

“You’re not Newt. Newt calls me Tommy.”

_Tommy…?_

“If we’re playing our greatest hits,” Thomas croaks through a clogged throat, “then you’re right. I did this to you.”

_No, you’re the reason we’re free._

“Yeah, and how’s that working out for you, Newt?” He squints into the sun. Shuts one eye, then the other. Maybe he’ll go blind, like Teresa’s mother.

_Then finish what you started._

“You never minced words. You never went easy on me.” He sighs. Coughs on dust. His arm hurts. “You just told me the truth.”

He should have killed Newt when Newt asked him to. He should have let Newt kill himself. 

 

_Zero Hour_

It comes to Thomas that this is his penance, that he will walk this wasteland with the shell of his friend—the best friend whom he killed—until he can find the courage to kill him again.

 

_Day… thirty-nine?_

He cleans Newt’s face again. His nose. His ears. His cracked lips. He checks the knife wound, and he chafes Newt’s fingers and toes to get the sluggish blood flowing.

His arm _hurts._

He inventories the bag again, but he has no idea what the rest of these drugs are.

 

_Day forty-one_

“I wish you would really talk. Anything, anything you want. You never talked enough, you know that? Never enough for me.” His foot hits something in the sand and he stumbles, barely catching himself. Thomas peers up into the sky, grimacing at the unending brightness. He’s sweating, a lot. This day feels colder than usual. “But you don’t talk. You probably don’t even have a tongue anymore.” He hasn’t been brave enough to pry Newt’s lips apart to see. But Newt’s fingers are a dull gray from lack of oxygen. Lawrence’s cratered face raids Thomas’s dreams whenever he has them and hovers before him in the haze of the Scorch. “At least you’re not festering.” He stops, braces his hands on his knees, and retches into the dirt. It pulls at the old wound in his stomach. Nothing but spit comes up. 

He wipes his mouth, takes a step, and falls down, thumping sidelong against a rock. _“Fuck.”_ He curls over his side, nursing the tender muscles and the fresh, fierce flash. When he can move again, he pulls up his shirt with shaky hands and peels down the bandage around his middle. It’s dirty, the skin bruised a greenish yellow, but the wound is healed. Not like his arm. “Okay,” he breathes through his teeth. “Okay.”

Another thump jolts him, but it’s just Newt, dropping to the ground in that weird sprawl of his. For a moment, he’s face down, fingers digging into arid soil. Then he pushes up, wobbling into a sitting position.

“Almost look normal.” Thomas waves at Newt’s... well, everything. “Except your hair. Hair’s wrong. You’re shucking filthy, man.”

Newt’s mouth opens and closes, but Thomas is too far away to hear whatever might be coming out now, and thank god for small favors. Very small favors. “Talk louder,” Thomas says anyway.

“All in this together,” Newt says dully. “All... together.”

“I think I’m sick. He talks to me. Real you. Real Newt. Shit, I’m sick.” He must have a fever. He’s sweating, but he can’t warm up. His eyes are blurring again and he keeps listing sideways. Probably that hunk of metal he cut his arm on. A week ago. Two weeks ago? Does it matter? He did it, and now he’s paying for it. There’s something he should be doing, something in the bag, maybe. _Check, Tommy, check again._ But he can’t think and he wouldn’t be able to read the labels anymore if he tried. “Probably inject myself with cyanide. At least it would be quick.”

“In this together,” comes the drone.

“You should help me.” He shakes the bag at Newt, then thunks it down. It’s heavier than he remembers. “Should tell me what to take. Real you, I mean. Not the Crank.”

“...together.”

“Crank Newt.” He snorts, then snickers. “Cranky Newt.” It’s coming on hard, rolling up out of his throat. Thomas feels hot and clammy, swollen in places he can’t pinpoint. He leans back and laughs harder than he can remember, all wild noise and sharp edges.

He bends forward then, clutching the ache blooming in his chest. His arm throbs. Too hot. They’ll bake to death. He wipes his eye with a filthy wrist and gets painfully to his feet. “Well. Come on, Cranky Newt.”

Newt groans as Thomas drags him to his feet. But he staggers across the flats behind Thomas all the same.

 

_Day forty…something_

“Finish what you started.” Once-Newt’s lips move; the words shift the sand in puffs. It’s the first time he’s ever spoken at night. “Finish what you started.”

Thomas is _trying._ He is such a shucking coward. At least Teresa acted. Had convictions.

 

_Day… he doesn’t know anymore._

He rolls up his sleeve and finds black and brown and green snaking a bracelet around his wrist. He laughs for a whole minute.

Of course this is how he will die. He’s screwed up his immune system so much that it can’t keep up anymore. 

 

“Tommy.” 

_Tommy._

“Yes.”

_Where are we?_

“You’re the one leading.”

“But where are we?”

He flips over, sighs into the dirt. “Come on. You know I don’t know that.”

 

“Tommy?”

No.

“Thomas. Answer me.”

No.

“Tommy, _please.”_

Hell no.

 

He coughs. Flare bile tastes awful: sweet and sick, rotten in the center.

He’s cold all the time now, and his hands shake like palsy. Is this how Newt felt? Thomas would never have been able to keep silent.

He tries to get up. He can’t even manage his knees. Isn’t he supposed to get angry? Newt was so angry. So angry with him.

“Newt.” He feels around for the canteen but he can’t swallow. Once-Newt is a blur of color—gray clothing, pale skin, yellow hair—crouched over him.

 _Finish what you started,_ Real Newt says.

“I am,” he whispers, and sighs, truly relieved. “I finally am.”

 

Shake. Someone’s shaking him.

 _Tommy!_ Real Newt looms in front of the Scorch light. _You can’t just leave me, you bloody shank, I don’t even know where we are!_

Thomas licks dry lips with a dryer tongue. What a strange thing for Real Newt to say.

Newt’s last word was his name. It swims through the mush that is Thomas’s brain, all the wrong he has done and how very much he didn’t want to do it to this person.

His eyes hurt. He doesn’t know if he’s capable of speech anymore, but he has to try. One of them—once-Newt, Real Newt—will hear him. “Newt?”

Hands seize his face. Cradle it. “Tommy?”

He reaches up, touches soft, dry skin. “M’sorry.”

And then he’s gone.

 

_“Tommy!”_

~tbc~


	3. Chapter 3

**III**

 

_“Tommy?”_

_“Tommy, just… Don’t go.”_

 

He wakes inside a cocoon of orange light.

Outside, the wind howls, and sand spatters across ballooning canvas. Inside, it’s warm and still. The glow is all around him. Sand at his back, cupped to hold his body. He opens his mouth and his lips crack at the corners. The sting of it flickers through him, and some of the blur clears from his eyes. He’s covered, stripped of his jacket but wrapped in it like it’s a blanket. He’s thirsty, and his stomach aches, just a little. His right leg tingles as though half asleep. The pain in his arm is gone; he looks down and finds it bandaged in clean gauze. There is no sign of the twisting, putrid roots under his skin. The strap of the medicine bag is looped round his wrist, around another wrist beside his, and _there—_

_Please god please_

There are changes. Veins still thread his throat, but they’re blue instead of black. Even closed, his eyes are sunken, cheeks hollowed by hunger. But it’s him.

“Newt,” Thomas whispers.

Newt’s head comes up with a jerk, his eyes flying wide. The sclera are strange and jaundiced, fading blood, but his irises are darker, deeper, rich and brown. Aware. Thomas sees the pupils contract. “Tommy,” comes out on a hiss.

Thomas chokes. He tries to say Newt’s name again. It won’t come. Fingers climb over his face, Newt’s _hand,_ pale, washed out, searching. It’s too much: Thomas gasps, a flood of air roaring into his lungs. His head goes light; his limbs spasm all at once, and he seizes Newt, clamping round his waist, round his shoulder, pressing him tight to his own body.

“Ow, ow, Tommy—”

Thomas releases him, instinctive. Newt doesn’t let him get far: hands grasp his, _warm_ hands, _supple_ hands, full of blood and breath and life. 

_Please god please god please god please_

“How,” Thomas gets out, and his lungs go into a heave, sucking to his ribs and rattling his heart, _“how,”_ and then he’s out of words, clinging with his face pressed to Newt’s throat, right over the throb of his heart.

 

Maybe they never watched a Crank through the Gone. Maybe they never washed its skin and cleaned its wounds, fed it, massaged its fingers and toes, treated the opportunistic infections, and waited to see what would happen.

Maybe Newt just had something the others never did.

A storm batters their makeshift tent, but inside, the air is close and hot with shared breath. “How long was I…?”

“Eight days.” Newt shows Thomas bottles, more glinting liquid, more empty syringes. He sighs, that same self-deprecating huff. “I tried what I knew.” He rolls an empty vial between his fingers in the fading light. Tazobactam. There’s a healthy flush in Newt’s fingers again, though the skin is still patchy and deathly white in places. “I thought you were immune.”

Thomas inhales, and savors the taste of oxygen without the sand. “I’m _the_ immune.”

He almost wasn’t.

“You were so sick.” Newt’s voice is soft enough to be lost under the wind, but Thomas has always, always been able to hear him. “I thought… I thought.” His fingers brush at Thomas’s shirt. “But you’re tough. God, Tommy, you’re tougher than all of us.”

No. Newt is the strong one. He’s always been the strong one. Newt bulled through the Flare and came out the other side. “How?” This word alone tramples Thomas every time, gags his throat and jabs holes through his chest.

“I don’t know.” When Newt breathes, his lungs still rasp. “It was like coming out of the densest fog. First there was only…” His throat works. “The Flare. Then I could see things. See you. I yelled and I yelled but you never seemed to hear.”

“I heard.” He wipes his eyes. Shakes his head when Newt makes a questioning noise.

“I don’t _know,”_ Newt says again, plaintive. Lost. “I dreamed… or… I saw you, and then I didn’t. And then I did, and you had _it.”_ Tears spill in a rush down Newt’s cheeks. “You had it, and you shouldn’t have. Should never have.”

Newt stayed with him, even though he was weak. So weak. “You shouldn’t have stayed.” The horror is potent. “What if I’d turned?”

Newt plucks at Thomas’s shirt with too-thin fingers. “I’ve already been to hell.” He looks up. “Nothing you could do to me would be worse than that.”

Thomas swallows, and Newt leans in. Up. 

He tastes like metal and scorched earth, but his lips against Thomas’s are dry and warm.

 

Nights are pitch black. Newt’s fingers loop and re-loop in the cord around Thomas’s neck. “You’re wearing it.”

 _I never stopped._ But he had, for one mad moment. “It was all I had left of you.”

Newt’s weight shifts in Thomas’s arms, and then a light flares: the lighter from the downed Berg. “There’s a letter.”

“Where?”

Newt gives the lighter to Thomas to hold, then wiggles the odd charm on the necklace apart. A cap for a tube. He shows Thomas the paper inside, folded and folded and folded, a closed bud waiting to bloom. “I wrote it for you. In case I died.”

But he didn’t. He hasn’t. “Read it to me?”

For a second, Newt is silent. “I’ll do you one better.”

“Oh?”

“I’ll tell it to you. But not yet.”

Newt takes the necklace from him, wraps the string around the pendant and tucks it away in his shirt, and Thomas feels a strange jiggle, like the world is flipping round backward. 

He has _read_ that letter, somewhere. Somewhen. 

The understanding fades. He couldn’t have read it: until now, he didn’t know it was there. But for a second... he knows he did.

“Sleep now.” Newt blows out the flame.

 

He jolts awake to screams of his name.

“Tommy Tommy _Tommy!”_

Daylight pierces his eyes. Newt’s arm thrashes out, knocks the canvas enclosure with a great whump; his leg strikes right through the fluttering wall, kicking the fabric wide. Sand shifts in on a great heave of wind.

Thomas’s mind goes white. It’s the Flare. The Flare has him again. _Ohpleasegodpleasegodpleasegod—_

But Newt’s eyes are wide and clear and so very, very brown, his pupils dwindling to specks. He smacks his arm out again, fingers curled like claws, tears scraping his voice around Thomas’s name. Thomas lunges, slams a leg down over Newt’s, winds both arms around his body as tightly as he can, hauls him in so fast that Newt’s forehead clips his chin.

“Newt! Newt.” Newt’s shaking from top to toe, great wrenches of sound, limbs jerking, trying to flail free. Thomas presses Newt’s face to his throat until he feels each erratic burst of breath; he buries his nose in Newt’s dirty tangle of hair. “Wake up,” he chants through his teeth. “Wake up, wake up, wake up.”

Slowly, Newt’s muscles release. But the shaking goes on and on, until Thomas can read the rhythm well, the choked hitch.

“Is this real?” Newt hiccups into Thomas’s throat, the words as chipped as old razors. His hands bury themselves in Thomas’s clothing, digging into his sides. “Tommy, is this real?”

Thomas whispers over and over again: “Yes. Yes. Yes.”

**

The canvas flaps in the darkness. The sand beneath them still holds warmth. Newt has gone quiet. He faces away from Thomas, his back a pulse of heat against Thomas’s chest, muddling his senses. The wind has blustered all night, but now purple light bleeds through their shelter, the tremble of oncoming dawn. Newt’s fingers squeeze painfully between Thomas’s. Squeeze and release. Squeeze and release. 

_This is real. Damn it, this is_ real. 

Time ticks. Vanishes. Newt grips Thomas’s hand where it rests over his belly. Swipes his thumb across the back. Curls his fingers through Thomas’s again. 

Then he pulls, gentle at first, bumping Thomas’s fingers over jutting hip bones and concave stomach. It’s real. It’s real. Newt guides their hands under the thready waistline of his own trousers, their knuckles catching on fabric. Thomas sucks in a breath, but Newt turns his head and their mouths meet, a humid tangle of tongue and teeth, wrecked sound. 

Newt’s mouth tastes of old blood. Musk. He turns over, shuffling the canvas and pressing down full bodied atop Thomas. Thomas gasps out of the kiss, into it again, everything pulling taut inside him at once. 

“Tommy,” Newt pleads against his lips. 

This, this. Newt. The center of Thomas fills at last, a balmy sea rushing in, scouring out the dead tissue. Cleaning all the hurt away. He tugs at Newt’s shirt, fisting stiff fabric until he bares Newt’s heaving chest— 

…and finds the _lubdub, lubdub_ of Newt’s heart.

It takes Thomas in a gust: he presses his face to Newt’s bare chest and cries, great, wrenching sobs that snap through his lungs. Newt releases his hand, and Thomas grabs hold of him and _cries._

“I’m sorry.” He whispers it to Newt’s breastbone where that beautiful heart rabbits. “M’sorry.”

_I’m sorry I let you suffer. I’m sorry I didn’t do the one thing you ever asked of me._

He couldn’t. He couldn’t.

“No.” Newt breathes it into his ear, right through the grief. He holds Thomas’s head close, shushes it into his hair. “No.”

Yes.

“You came back for me.” Newt’s voice splinters completely. “You…” His whole body jumps as though he’s been shocked. “You came back—”

Thomas turns him around, drags him in with both arms, until Newt’s back is pressed to his chest again, until he can curl in around him. Kiss him. Tuck all the tears away.

 

The sun rises. 

The Scorch stretches in every direction. On the horizon, the Last City’s spires clip the light. Thomas and Newt sit side by side, the canvas cloaking their shoulders, and watch the last threads of smoke sift into the sky. 

 

There are things Newt still doesn’t remember, pieces of him eaten entirely by the Flare. His throat and chest will probably never shed the tracery of blasted veins and capillaries, and the thumb of his right hand and all of his toes are crooked and gray, the nerves deadened completely at the tips. 

But he is Newt again, and he is Thomas’s, and that is enough.

 

_Day one_

Thomas turns the radio back on.

 

~fin~

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you SO MUCH to coffeejunkii for being my beta! And friend!


End file.
